Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

This continues directly from my previous post, although a brief technical note before getting to the blog post proper: there is a saved-game feature but it is very fussy to get to work on DOSBox (Canalboy in his instructions says it took five hours to figure it out). I am sidestepping all that entirely with the emulator DOSBox-X which has very good save state features so I can ignore the issue.

…

For any large-scale and relatively wide-open treasure hunt, the first order of business is mapping things out. Let me take you on a tour.

From a pamphlet advertising the Classic Quests.

The game starts at a church, and all treasures go on the altar.

There are a few dark niches which require a lamp we’ll get to fairly soon. It is in one of these niches that I ran across my first death.

You are in a high ceilinged chamber, there is an exit to the south and a dark passage leading up. The west wall looks as though it used to contain some kind of doorway, but not now. There is a rope hanging almost in the centre of the chamber, it disappears up into darkness.

>U

It is very dark in here.

>U

Something nasty in the dark has found you very tasty. You are between a hard place and a rock, with flames rising om the ground all around, seemingly fueled by the very rocks themselves.

When you die you go to Hell, and this might be like Acheton where there could be a way out. This is indicated by a Good Book elsewhere in the church.

The “entering Heaven with certain holy writings” bit at least suggests it might be possible to go to Heaven on death rather than Hell. The “defiling the holy altars” part incidentally also indicates swearing at the altar will also kill you; this is true, but not with the word “shit”, which is apparently a noun rather than a verb (it maps to “manure” which is an object, and I think the one that’s supposed to be buggy).

Nearby the Good Book — on the opposite side of an Aisle — is a podium hiding some keys. Open questions are:

there’s a font with holy water, where is there a container that allows getting it?

and

is there some secret associated with the “west wall looks as though it used to contain some kind of doorway”?

The holy water I incidentally suspect will got to a vampire we’ll see close to where the lamp is, and the west wall I suspect is one of those secrets that gets resolved “from the other side” (that is, this is a placeholder for arriving via elsewhere on the map) but with less confidence, as there’s some nonsensical map connections elsewhere.

(Nonsensical map connections are more of a schtick in ’77-’82 games than they are in ’86 games, but I suspect the geography is mostly matching the original. However, I’m going to try to avoid speculating too much about the early version of the game because whenever I play Brian Cotton’s next game, there’s both early and “revisited” versions so I can compare so I can get a sense of how much fiddling was going on.)

Popping around outside there’s a graveyard I got lost in last, but the maze is fairly small (don’t worry, there’s a bigger maze later) and I was able to get to a tomb, which unlocks with the keys.

Just inside there’s a closed coffin with a lamp and sword. I can’t confirm — that’s not a bizarre combo to just come up with independently — but I’m wondering if there was more influence from Zork than Adventure on this game. Zork had some religious bits with the Land of the Dead, but original Adventure is squarely secular (resurrection in that game is from the computer-narrator itself).

To the east of the coffin is Dracula. (Guessing it was his original hang-out point, but the big stake in the chest messed with his sleeping arrangements.)

Dracula doesn’t immediately try to kill you (“Count Dracula is looking around to see what’s for tea.”) so may have some utility behind putting him down again (you can’t stab again with the stake, alas). You can run away and he doesn’t follow, although he does take the stake from you, so there doesn’t seem to be a reason to wake him up early.

Just a bit farther there’s a coin marked OBOLUS and a ferry at the river Styxx. The coin can go to Charon for a one-way trip.

The “you can’t carry anymore” in the screen above hints at the fact there’s a fair number of items and the inventory limit is pretty rough. Based on Roger Durrant there’s going to be a lot of strategic juggling to get the right items to the right places. It isn’t done by absolute number of objects either, items have weight, so a cloak is heavier than some keys. Have I mentioned yet — like Zork — there’s limited battery to the lamp, so the whole game is under a timer?

The area isn’t large, or at least I haven’t made it large yet. The fuzzy ball covers a slab which indicates to watch for the fuzzy ball’s mother, and if you try to set the critter back down it just jumps back into your arms.

Is there something hidden in the grass at the Elysian fields?

How do you deal with the geyser?

You can also land yourself in a room just described as “Lost souls” with no apparent escape…

All about can be heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth of many lost souls, who cannot find their way to heaven or anywhere else.

…leading to the natural question: is the lost souls room just a trap or is there a way out?

Ignoring the river and proceeding on, there’s some catacombs. I have the “maze with no other purpose to be maze-y” rooms marked in blue.

There are two mysterious rooms that are “almost perfect cube[s]” where the north wall has a “shadowy figure”. What can be done in the cube rooms? Next to ne of the cube rooms is a “glass carafe” and a ruby. I have not yet had the opportunity to test if the carafe works on holy water.

There’s an “ancient room” with a message

N- S-AM--NG -N THE -ATA-OMB-

which I assume says NO STAMPING IN THE CATACOMBS, which is fine because I haven’t run across anything to do stamping with yet. I assume this is to prevent the traditional item-dropping solution to the maze, but honestly wouldn’t using a stamp be more clever?

One last section I explored — an offshoot of the catacombs — was a crystal palace.

There’s a treasure room with a “warning to all those who wouldn’t be king” adjacent to a room with some laundry. If you try to leave, you get told “not yet cretin”, but the laundry has a crown hidden within. If you wear the crown you can get out of the “cretin” passage.

The only real puzzle otherwise is a spider (“hairy with lots of legs”) with a web blocking one direction.

I scissors on me so I can safely say they aren’t the answer to how do I pass the spider web? It may be none of the puzzles are that hard individually but the logistics of solving order is where the real suffering lies.

For me to be sure, I have to solve a real puzzle first (I don’t count the crown or mapping out mazes as puzzles). Maybe next time?